This is a fascinating subject, made even more so by the explosion of personal publication of language and the attempts to control what is acceptable public speech through the news media.

Stavrosthewonderchicken has the original post here
Joho responds here

What interests me most about this is whether, in a language as highly structured for social relations as Korean and in one where those structures are much less evident such as English, the ability of a society to adapt to changing circumstances is enhanced or retarded.

I'm not proselytising one way or the other but it seems that a structured social language like Korean might actually offer a much stronger foundation for accepting and absorbing change than English where each relation has to be negotiated individually.

There would naturally be differences again depending on whether the change was generated from within or without, but in a time of ever more radical change, those societies and languages that can evaluate and adapt fastest with the least energy consumption, will almost certainly be the survivors.

Incidentally, what do you think the effect on this process in English has been with the introduction of the honorific Ms?

On a related point, there is now some discussion on various Blogs, (too lazy to find the references right now) about the all-or-nothing status of a hyperlink on the web. Some are wanting to be able to say "I think this is important to the discussion but I strongly disagree" for example, and encode that into the hyperlink so that Google will account for the opinion of the linker as well as the density of the links. Maybe we should ask the Koreans to come up with the taxonomy for us.

For those who don't believe that emergence is a real process which occurs because many many factors are linked in more complex ways than we can ever begin to calculate, this story from the Mercury news (Linked from the Agonist) might give pause.

"This period from the 1970s is without precedent in the history of the annals of medicine," Dr. Paul Epstein, associate director of Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and Global Environment.

The Institute of Medicine convened a panel of top U.S. researchers [who] attributed the surge in new diseases to 13 specific changes in the world and the way we live.

Those 13 factors are microbial adaptation and change; human susceptibility to infection; climate and weather; changing ecosystems; human demographics and behavior; economic development and land use; international travel and commerce; technology and industry; breakdown of public health measures; poverty and social inequality; war and famine; lack of political will; and bioterrorism.

Of the more than 35 new emerging diseases since the 1970s "a substantial proportion relate to man's manipulation of ecology," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview Thursday.

Those who give MS a hard time about the quality of their software can get pretty shrill at times, but then again, there's this

The folks at Awasu continue to do a splendid job of developing their Newsreader. The latest tweaks include some excellent new capabilities.

• Rather than collecting feeds as fixed categories, you can now collect them into filtered groups managed by a number of criteria such as unread items or new items. The great benefit is that when you access the filters you only see those feeds in the group that meet your criteria at this moment, much tidier.
• They can also generate Meta channels which re-aggregate content from several feeds into one channel. This is especially useful with the next tool
• Reports. These take the content from the feed and generate output documents hat are simple web pages, but they can be published anywhere on your network. Imagine being able to filter information from multiple sources around your enterprise, collect it according to very specific interest groups and republish on your corporate intranet, or save the file for publication to your own website. Awasu does it.
• The final new kink is even better, Channel Hooks wait till something happens on the specified channel, such as an update, then take the information and send it somewhere else, such as to a window on your desktop, or in an email to a specified recipient.

The Author of Guns germs and Steelcontinues to ask interesting questions and draws on a fact pointed out by Tim Flannery in The Future Eaters, that it is possible for societies to act in their own, long term worst possible interests, yet not be able to stop themselves.

He identifies what he calls "four somewhat fuzzily delineated categories".

• First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives.
• Secondly, when the problem arrives, the group may fail to perceive the problem.
• Then, after they perceive the problem, they may fail even to try to solve the problem.
• Finally, they may try to solve it but may fail in their attempts to do so.